


The Greatest Story Never Told

by cryptonomicon



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A Complete Retcon of Temporal Theory, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Pepper Potts, BAMF Queen Mother Ramonda, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Captain America: Civil War (Movie), M/M, Marvel 616/MCU Crossover, Multiverse, Multiverse Fix-It, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Time Travel Fix-It, no proofreading - death doesn't count your spelling errors, why is there a time travel fix it tag that has to call me out like this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-01-29 23:23:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21418396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptonomicon/pseuds/cryptonomicon
Summary: It was the curse of being prescient that at times, or perhaps only once if both gifted and unlucky, one woke with terrible and necessary ideas. Not acting on them thereafter wasn't an option, especially when inaction meant the death of the Omniverse. Action meant, at best, a snowball's chance in Mephisto's whisky glass.Which was still better than nothing, all things considered.They have to try anyway - for something deep within the universes is rupturing outward. And unless two disparate men tripping along with fate's tides can find a way to stop the dimensional hemorrhaging, those ruptures become permanent, omniversal reality.And that just won't do.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Stephen Strange
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	1. Send A Seed To A Distant Future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drcpalmer](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=drcpalmer).

> Long story short, the premise for this fic comes from a long-abandoned RP idea generated with a friend, herein actively commemorated. Any and all original tumblr source texts have been discarded - meaning as a good writing instructor I refuse to even approach open plagiarism, especially amongst friends - thus leaving what my mind has made of galvanizing the shared ideas, after more than two years, entirely original at least in construction. But I cite my sources carefully, because I would never dream of conceptually developing this alone nor can I claim to want to.
> 
> If you want to ask me questions about this spicy disaster-in-the-making, you can find me on the tungls, at  crypto_noms. I will probably post updates every 2 or so weeks depending on life being more or less of a tit. Or, seasonally, several tits at once.
> 
> What comes of it... well, you'll just have to find out. But this is a long enough ride that I'll warn for now it's M for including semi-graphic depictions of violence/adult themes in the first few chapters, and it will be upgraded to E _very_ eventually when canoodling occurs. When the canoodling commences, you will be notified.
> 
> If it's not clear at all, I have major complaints with Avengers: Endgame and everything the Russos have laid their grubby mitts on, and overall with Marvel comic canon being a hot mess orgiastic garbage burn. The garbage burn is at least longer standing, but no better respected. Hence I will retcon everything as I so please into shameless oblivion at the nearest opportunity, and hide behind genuinely harmless internet impunity if necessary. If they press charges for malignant character _use_, I die valiantly. Witness me.
> 
> For this story is about how one universe's Stephen Strange happens upon another's Steve Rogers, and how the two of them, with disparate experiences, methods, and minds, go about saving the Omniverse from the outside in.
> 
> So in the wise and famous words of James T. Kirk: Buckle up.

Something changed in the slim minutes between the deep Manhattan night and its early morning. Goldened urban moonlight faded into simmering periwinkle, a fresh and concrete day dawning as Stephen lay flat in his bed, painfully awake and considering as claws of shadow gradually retreated behind exposed beams. It all really began when the new day’s light didn’t loosen his searing heartstrings. Something pointed and integral, strung end to end and yet not enough to fill a hummingbird’s wing-beat, was absent - failed to numb him to the siren song of jumbled dreams that made him both desperate and mortally afraid to get out of bed. 

Bless or curse him, indecision had never been one of his problems. It took only a few shivering seconds to settle back into his burdened bones before he got up, and fought back.

The notion was, frankly, absolutely stupid. Nonetheless, he tried valiantly to dawdle through his empty morning routine. He brushed his teeth meeting only the gaze of the sink and knotted the ties on his robes without letting his fingers in view. That he’d made it through a quick shower and into his clothes wasn’t even impressive - it was just the deceptive undercurrent of necessity, drawing him inexorably to the decision he’d been fighting against having already made. Yet he was still straining to inoculate himself with painful normalcy in the hope it could halt the phenomenal infection. 

Normalcy predictably failed.

Halfway through the futile exercise of waiting on the morning drip to percolate through the Sanctum’s ancient and long-abused _Mr. Coffee_, the virulent inertia finally overwhelmed him. He turned and left his favorite _Strand Bookstore_ mug next to the still gurgling pot he would never touch. The charmed hot plate would turn off in an hour, just before he made his departure.

The walk to his primary study felt longer than usual, a mile in the space of a minute’s walk where he had one last chance to turn back to his coffee; to ask himself whether he really was going to leap off the corners of the infinite proverbial map on some fool’s errand - _his_ fool’s errand - and in doing so potentially risk the fate of his own reality. The care of this beautiful universe had been left to his broken hands, but the dreams had placed a much heavier and dire weight on his heart. One which he unfortunately couldn’t ignore, for love nor duty. Not even the most logical, empirical bone in his fragmented body could argue with what he’d seen.

It was hard to discount witnessing the death of the known Omniverse, or feeling deep in the familiar roots of time and destiny curled around his heart that something had Happened, _would keep Happening_ \- to the fabric of everything that had existed or ever could - until there was nothing left but the funereal pall of precious, stolen _may-bes_.

Stephen had to stop for a moment, standing at the brink of the study. The cloak’s bottom hem wandered anxiously around his calves, and he imagined he could feel it share his indecision. Maybe it too was torn between pulling him back and pushing him forward, and he finally made the decision for them both by resolutely stepping over the breach. 

He wouldn’t turn back. Not with the howling still living in his mind.

His torturously perfect memory would never erase the timbre and din of ruined multitudes, or the universes and timelines uncounted left adrift and festering like gangrenous wounds in the aether. That night, they had flashed before his eyes and still rang in his ears with the impossible justification of a single snap. From the moment he woke, if not well before, he’d been trapped in the final plea emanating from their charybdic whorl. 

But that did not mean he didn't wish with every free fiber in his purportedly human heart for release from the impossible path laid out ahead of him.

There was no peace in him until he placed the Eye of Agamotto and the tomes he needed onto his desk. Cyttorak, Watoomb, Faltine, Raggadorr, Ikonn, Munnopor, Balthakk, and even Agamotto themselves... 

Their weight and gaze staring up at him brought him back into his body, to the hands fanned and still weakly trembling around the artifacts that could and would allow his idiotic stab at acting heroic on behalf of the endless heavens.

Now it was just up to the ultimate fool to go and actually do it.

Stephen felt the deep, tidal tie to his own timeline pry at him even as he _considered_ leaving it potentially forever, as it well knew. That inertia was the spiritual tether all dimension and time walkers _needed_ in order to keep their heads, a sort of existential compass that always led back to where they belonged. It yoked, as much as it anchored. 

In that moment, listening to the wakening Bleecker Street and feeling the wash of warm sun from the south windows reach his skin, he knew he had to break free of that lead line. If he was going to save this precious little world with its oh so fragile sunlight and oh so precious laughter, as industrious New Yorkers went from sleeping back to seeking their livelihoods - their _lives_ \- he would have to risk it finding a way to carry on without him.

He would leave. Would suffer breaking free of his own anchor, and in doing so set himself adrift upon the seas of the dimensions. And true, in doing so may never return.

Worse, however, was that if he didn’t leave, nothing in his dreams would change.

Thanos would still come. His world would still end. But it wasn’t _just_ his world that would end - it was all of them. A fatal blow had been struck deep in the balance of _Everything_, fracturing outward in jagged, paradoxing ripples. Thanos had already succeeded in the Omniverse’s great and terrible Somewhere, and that one success was dragging the rest of existence down with it.

And here he’d been, afraid of taking those traumatizing dreams as a bid to do anything but stay home in bed, have coffee and scones with Wong, and mull over the end of every Whatever. Instead, Wong would have coffee alone. And those friends, those big and small heroes he steadfastly supported when they came calling… they wouldn’t have him. Not for a while, or possibly ever again.

And yet he believed that morning, perhaps most daring of all his vain intuitions, that if he left, and most importantly _got the job done_, they would _live_. Not _half_ of those gallant and vital people, grouching along while making coffee themselves through so many open windows along the Village. _All_ of them, inasmuch as they had the right to choose to do so. 

Rightfully, it _wasn’t_ his choice to make alone.

He had a caste of sorcerers to answer to, who looked to him for protection, guidance... and their weekly drama. He even had a few spare friends and somewhat savory enemies who called on him in a pinch from time to time. All of them faiths he was going break, the tomes and Eye reminded him as a stinging energy itched in the plates nestled against his bones.

He _should_ discuss it, or in the least announce it. Phone a friend. Make a game plan, even. Have some contingency or another. Or several, should he fuck it up, which was a distinct likelihood.

He had neither the time nor the will to wait out the bureaucracy... or the bleeding hearts.

He slipped the Eye of Agamotto over his neck. He’d left it in the study the previous night, then tired of its chaining weight on his shoulders. Now he understood why it had been bothering him so much: it too had been sensing something, trying clue him in to symptoms of a larger undisclosed problem. 

Now he had seen the symptoms first hand. He had seen what it has seen. 

The Eye was now unnervingly light around his neck, a counterpoint to the heaviness of the heart still drumming against his ribs. Eleven-ish ounces of muscle, feather light in the grand scheme, but still torn between grieving what he would lose and what the Omniverse was _still_ losing.

The tomes opened, and he concentrated on the drumming in his ears rather than the screams in his memories as his body moved on willful autopilot. He read, stitching together a pantheon of spells, hands moving disparate universal ephemera into the air around him. The sigil was impeccable, the energies hesitant at first now thrumming with their own manner of surprise, lines of power flaring white hot as he let their purpose draw through his conduit form. It _hurt_ \- felt like every cell in his body getting wrung dry in one hard pulse - but the high of being connected to the flow of the Omniverse, of letting go and taking that leap off the deep end and into the infinite _Everything_… 

It would never get old.

And because he was going out there, un-writing The End at the final page of reality’s manuscript, it really never would - not even for all that Thanos had done. _Would_ do. _Could_ do.

When their merged power tilted into equilibrium, the searing light settling into his heart and his gaze resolutely turned forward, he left his world behind with an echoing snap from his own broken fingers.


	2. Flesh And Steel Are One

He came around to the biting, compounded reek that came from burning structures. Wood, gasoline, plastic, fabric, flesh. He knew what a city on fire smelled like: Hong Kong, New York, thousands of civilizations in dimensions he never spoke of. During Hong Kong, and before it the Incident, the sky before his eyes had ripped open, and the universe he’d only ever considered as just a distant theoretical figment beyond the little blue sphere of their sky had come rushing in. 

Looking up at the inky black of that same sky from half a world and so many dimensions away, he wondered how long his own dimension had before it too was sullied by the same apocalyptic stench. 

Indignation rattled within him like a starvation, aching and angry at the presiding but undefined injustice of it all. Yet that raw rage didn’t stop him from staggering up from the damp forest floor, nor was it the cause of the sudden vertigo that nearly knocked him back down. Every fiber of him was still reeling from the omniversal migrational spell he’d engineered essentially on undergrad insomniac citation skills, but a whole new breed of shock planted on his skin like a brand at the sight before him. Trapped between the effects of both, he had to lean heavily on the charred trunk of a fever tree to keep from sinking to his knees. 

Birnin Zana was nothing more than a smoldering skeleton - a sprawl of the hulking remnants of what was once the most developed society on the planet. Rather than aglow with light and music and industry, there was only the drone of rain in the far hills and a haunting silent echo of where so many people no longer were. 

Pinpricks of firelight still twinkled between gaps in the ruins, but in his heart he knew that they were nothing more than the final throes before humanity closed her eyes and winked out of existence in the encroaching dark. The howling had already been here, and had long, long gone.

On coltish legs he made his way down the hillside, even his sparse shuffling made deafening in the ambient still. Nothing living crossed his path as he wove between the great houses that loomed with yawning moonlit teeth, ruptured shreds of the district where Wakanda’s most eminent officials used to take their leave of worries. At the foot of the highest crest and among the trees who had seen all of its passing, he finally met the city’s edge.

Venturing forward past the verge of the trees brought a chill over him regardless of the wet night-warmth of the jungle at his back. Even his wide gaze couldn’t penetrate everything around him, but he knew in turn that did not mean other eyes couldn’t see him. He hid himself in the long jagged shadows between light sources as he wove into the wreckage - failing starlight, chemical embers that just wouldn’t quite go out, the occasional crackling fire in a pit or drum, unmanned, but still marking pocks of humanhood both lighting his way and giving him slices of vital anonymity. 

The problem now, he thought as he took in his surroundings from the doorway of a half-shredded stucco structure, was to figure out what the hell the spell had brought him here for. Part of its power had come from allowing the magics of the universe to send him where they needed him the most; a manner of dimensional roulette that let the winds of serendipity decide his course rather than fain human machination. It was, he hoped, humble servitude enough to keep him from being killed by the magics he’d handed his life to. For the more someone supplicated their usefulness to the universe, the less the universe tended to bite back.

Sometimes. For some people. Most of the time not for him, but it was a damn good spell anyway.

The trouble with such a spell, he was coming to realize as he neared the heart of the city with a familiar sinking feeling of a distinct shortage of forethought, was that once he was in a dimension, he was otherwise back to his own devices.

He spent approximately three seconds too long contemplating that realization in a patch of firelight he forgot to move out of. He barely had enough time to flinch when a swift shadow hauled his ass six feet sideways and slammed him into the body of a desolate vehicle, hard enough to rattle it on its creaky shocks. His lungs rattled too.

While he was prepared for a fight once his brain had caught up with his uselessly belated flinch, he emphatically was not prepared to be pinned to the wreckage of a gutted UN humvee by none other than a haggard and glowering Captain America.

“You chose the wrong face to steal, pal,” his fellow American threatened, but despite himself Stephen didn’t even feel the threat pierce his hide, let alone sink down into his bones. He was already saturated with dread - he could hardly be drowned in more. 

_For now_, a whisper in his head warned.

“You have about three seconds to let go of me, Captain Rogers,” he argued, wishing that he was as sure of his magical reserves as he sounded. But he didn’t like the dark glint in the other’s eye, and he sure as hell didn’t like his chances being a cripple and certifiably running out of mojo in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. “Or I’ll remove you.”

_Three._ One dusty blond brow raised. _Two._ Something of a smirk curled on Steve’s lips, hollow of real bemusement. _One._

Pulling magic up from his core nearly winded him, but in a flash of orange a blazing sigil knocked Rogers back, sending him skidding to a halt flat on his ass on what remained of the sidewalk, some six feet away. He sucked in the breath the other had been pressing out of his collarbones, but when the air rushed in his vision dappled. He listed heavily against the conveyor tread of the humvee, the cloak vainly cushioning the impact as a tight pinch between his eyes and a sudden wetness against his lips indicated he’d helpfully sprung a nosebleed. The following silence only left the yawning chasm between them of why Captain America would think someone was impersonating him, and what that absence implied about his other self in this universe. 

“I warned you.” He’d been hoping to sound glib. He missed by miles.

Steve’s former empty derision was nowhere to be found. His face had gone sheet-white beneath his beard, flitting eyes desperate as they raked over him. He could practically feel the other man’s questions like a million and one needles on his skin. 

“Did you bring the others?”

Stephen waited. In the moment that passed, the bald confusion and painful hope in their gazes met, hit home, and sank into a shaky understanding. He had no idea what Steve was asking of him, and Steve, in turn, had even less of an idea of who he was than he’d thought.

The super soldier’s shoulders sank, and he popped his legs beneath him while he tried to hide the disappointment behind a less believable rendition of that blank mask he’d been wearing. Now that he’d seen through it, if only a glimpse, Stephen could see where it was still shining through the cracks that too much hardship had chiseled into its surface.

“You’re him. But you’re _not_, are you?”

“Something like that.”

He pushed himself off the dirt-encrusted humvee, wondering what the hell the UN was doing sending resources into Wakanda of all places. In his world, Wakanda justifiably turned its nose up at the UN. Letting in military aid and equipment would have been a tremendous, and unnecessary, loss of face. He stepped toward Rogers, slowly. The cloak was tight around his shoulders, ready to lift him out of striking distance should he get assaulted again. It too had been caught off guard by Steve’s initial attack, but seemed more vengeful than he not to miss any second volley from foe or undetermined friend.

To be fair, he was less concerned about another one-sided wrestling match so much as he was with the emptiness around them. He hadn’t been yet nine years old when Chernobyl had its meltdown - still old enough to remember Walter Cronkite’s voice declaring clarion but misinformed platitudes from a sound stage as his parents sat paralyzed in horror on their Spanish style paisley couch. The deafening silence he’d imagined in the wake of that evacuation, he felt, was still less harrowing that the one they were ensconced in now.

“What _happened_?” he dared ask. But the question bubbled around his lips, and he reached up to daub and apply pressure to the persistent blood trickling from his nostrils. He’d suffered a great deal in developing his affinity with magic, but this was a side-effect he dealt with infrequently… at least, up until now. He supposed it came in the territory of using an untested and exceedingly powerful spell: like untested medications, there was no knowing what problems laid in the to-be-determined fine print, nor what wonders it could otherwise accomplish. 

Upon first trial, he could only prove that his spell required not only good faith, but its pound of flesh as well.

The blond veteran of too many lost tomorrows turned away. “You’re not safe here. Come with me.”

There was a pointed lack of “we” in that statement. He opted to add it to the list of questions he could volley back against the ones he could feel brewing in his company’s mind as they wove through the rubble. 

As they went he mustered up the last dredges he had to bring a simple charm to his hands where they clasped at his bloody face, only to find that the simplest of healing spells bit at him as he tried to channel the energy. The nosebleed stopped, but the lingering initial betrayal reminded him of the collie on their farm that had nipped him one day. He’d been reaching to stroke her, unknowing that others on the old farm road they shared weren’t so kind to her. It hadn’t been her fault, and it wasn’t the magic’s either. The inflamed, stress-beaten response of the spiritual forces in this world nearly confirmed that it was then and would forever hence be without a Sorcerer Supreme, but he tried not to linger on that too much as he followed Rogers through the empty expanses stretched between every building.

Broken reality. Broken magic. Broken cities. Broken people.

And one broken Avenger left standing amidst it all. The Eye of Agamotto rested nearly burning-hot against the inner folds of his robes. He’d been careful to tuck the talisman under them once he’d arrived, for knowing that even in his own time Infinity Stones were beginning to catch attention from Terran and non-Terran interests alike. The fact that in this world, remaining Terrans were an _optional_ threat was not something that had occurred to him until he realized that, for all Rogers’ concern, he’d seen neither hide nor hair of any other person.

They walked in silence and shadow for more time than Stephen would have preferred to be on his feet, but the prolonged hyper-vigilance their circumstances injected him with was more than enough to keep him wide awake and padding silently in Rogers’ footsteps. The more emptiness they walked through, and the more his magical senses also probed into the gaping holes in Earth’s tapestry of supernatural forces, the more rooted his ongoing fear-response became.

Realistically, the spell had taken enough out of him to warrant a serious rest and a decent meal. Meditation too, if he could have spared the time.

Currently the thought of sleeping made him more nauseous than the usual dimensional whiplash, and that was _saying_ something.

Birnin Zana began to fall away from them, but before they could leave the outskirts of the city entirely they turned and skirted a lowe of what once were hill houses, gently smoldering in a flame that was too pink for his liking. Above them, on a hill far from Stephen’s entry point into this universe, the great citadel was the only dagger of rebellious moonlight to break up the sky above. A safe distance away from the low chemical blaze, the soldier expertly wove them through a small wilderness and to a door hidden in the darkness cast by a bulge in the hillside.

That bulge turned out to be their refuge, which Rogers secured adamantly after Stephen had made the threshold. Whatever technology was in the door still seemed to work, thankfully, and Stephen did feel his paranoia move down to a simmer at the sound of heavy bolts sliding into place.

Though he was tempted for a moment, he didn’t bother keeping his gaze down. His feet were somewhat disturbingly numb at this point, his nerves on a trip wire, and his manners left at home with the coffee he didn’t have before he left. Now was not the time for modesty, nor tactically not looking around out of some totally pointless stab at politeness.

He had left his dimension because he _wanted_ to see. So he was going to be a nosy sonuva bitch and drink in everything Rogers’ hideout had to tell him, and prise out what he couldn’t deduce of his own volition if he had to. He wanted the stories behind everything from the woven blanket draped over the only chair in the room, lovingly repaired but with edges lightly charred, to the picture frame that had been turned down on the desk empty of anything else save an oil lamp, an earthenware cup, and a bracelet of thick beads.

He wasn’t here to make friends in high society - he was here to save the worlds. And he got the feeling that for both of them that was about to involve a lot of uncomfortable but necessary nosiness.

The Avenger moved out of the small main room and into a dark corridor beyond, leaving Stephen to linger alongside the only light source. When he returned, it was with a wet cloth and a jar of water. He set the jar on the desk, handed the cloth in Stephen’s direction, and kicked the singular chair into the middle of the room with expectant precision.

Stephen wiped his face and sat, the cloak folding its front lapels in a pantomime of cross-armed offense for him. Rogers, for his part, didn’t look cowed or even curious.

“We lost,” Steve said simply.

“No _shit_,” he replied. “How?”

“Why don’t you tell me how _you_ got here? Then we’ll see if I feel like playing Twenty Questions.” The other man leaned back against the desk, bulky arms crossed. He was still cut, even in the wake of the apparent death of half his universe. Good for him. “You’ve got five years worth of the world’s questions to answer, and I have the sinking feeling you can’t answer them.” 

“Because I’m not from this universe.” 

“No shit,” the Captain parroted back at him, this time with a narrowing of his eyes that might have hinted at a smile had his mouth at all moved. “How?”

“How I got here, or how that’s possible?” he asked, eyeing the pitcher of water before he became aware of Steve catching his point of interest. If he was in any position to he might have glared at the other man, but for the time being he didn’t want to press his luck. It was a sneaky little tactic, though, withholding water until he started foisting over answers. Balancing a physical demand against an intellectual one. Textbook. For spy school, he supposed. Or superhero school. Either way.

“Yes.”

Stephen snorted in lieu of rolling his eyes like he wanted to. “I got here using a spell I designed that can cross the barriers between dimensions.” He looked back up at the other, wishing he wasn’t too foot-sore to stand eye to eye and even the playing field between them. But this wasn’t his universe, and it sure as hell wasn’t his interrogation. That much was clear enough to both of them. “And that’s possible because the Omniverse is every “what if” you can think of and a google of others you’re not psychotic enough to have ever imagined, woven together like the threads of a tapestry. You and I are from just two of those “what ifs,” albeit two very different ones.” 

_I hope._

“Now would you please tell me what the hell happened here?”

The Avenger sat for a moment, assessing him, deliberating. Stephen held his gaze, looking back with the cool defiance that had faced down impossible entities at the edge of the universe. And a doctoral dissertation defense, once upon a time. He could handle a bit of needling from Captain America. 

“We never found out what really happened to you out there, but by the time Thanos got to Earth, he had all of the other Infinity Stones. We didn’t succeed in keeping him from the one we had left.” Stephen had to give the man credit - he was almost holding himself together. “He won. Accomplished his goal of wiping out half the universe. But his sense of it restoring “balance”... it’s not working out that way. Not for Earth.” Sharp eyes looked back up at him where they’d drifted away, looking to the long shadows around them and all the ghosts within them. And here was Stephen Strange, an impossible ghost that had stepped out of that darkness. “Does any of that correlate to your… dimension?”

This truth came easy. “I know a great deal of Thanos in a historical sense,” he answered honestly. The records of the Titans were a seminal component of mythical studies at Kamar Taj, but his Earth’s last known interaction with the Titans had been during Agamotto’s time. “But so far as we’re aware he hasn’t been active in my universe in a long while. The Infinity Stones are, as yet, a non-issue aside from posing the occasional cataclysmic nuisance.” _Well, semi-frequently,_ he thought, _but not Omniverse-ending._

Rogers’ face was neutral throughout his explanation, but his hands had moved to pick up the small clay cup tucked to one corner of the desk and fill it with water. Apparently he’d passed that test, whatever it was. “So why did you come here? It’s obviously not to stop Thanos - you’re about five years late to that party.” 

Stephen grimaced. It was his turn to look away for a moment. The howling still rang in his ears. “Too late for this dimension, maybe. But not for the rest.” 

He knew his remorse was a paltry comfort for all that Rogers had lived through, but it was genuine all the same. His stab at saving the Omniverse was feeling more vain by the minute - but the spell had brought him here for a reason, and he owed it to the magics to see it through as to why. 

“That spell you made must pack a punch.” Stephen cautiously took the over-full cup as the Captain offered it to him, the tremor in his hands making a mockery of even his normal miserable grip strength. The flow of the conversation veering off any tractable course became secondary to not dumping water everywhere, much to Rogers’ advantage, he was sure. 

“All magic comes at a cost. Crossing dimensional barriers requires a phenomenal amount of energy - literally. Pushing my magic on the heels of such a big expenditure was… unanticipated.” Stephen left the bloodied wash cloth draped over one leg, resting the cup on the meat of the other thigh once he’d wet his tongue. He squared his knees, refusing to look small regardless of the impossible feeling of inconsequence he harbored. 

“But you’re going to do it again.” There was something of a challenge in that statement, a danger that Stephen couldn’t quite characterize. This Steve Rogers was shiftier, cattier than the one he knew, and his questions were loaded like shotgun shells. Bullets within bullets, questions within questions. 

“I have to. Thanos’ success is emanating shockwaves across reality, fragmenting outward, rupturing causality. It hasn’t just affected this universe - it’s affecting all of them.” _We’ll see how well that ninety-second explanation of complex dimensional theory sticks. With this crowd, probably like soap smothered in K-Y._ “Someone has to stop it before the barriers between dimensions break altogether.” 

“How did you know that this was happening?” That had not been the question he was anticipating. But Rogers' gaze was steady and immutable - attentive, curious, and otherwise frustratingly blank. It had taken Stephen almost a year of knowing Wong to decode his stoicism, but having to crack stoicism from Captain America was an unanticipated challenge. 

Stephen hesitated then, feeling that in spite of curtailing his answers he’d revealed more than he liked. About the nature of his journey, his magic. He was just glad the other man had veered away from personal questions, otherwise he would have been hopelessly exposed - if he wasn’t already. “I saw it in dreams.” 

Their eyes met, then. There was a question, perched right on the verge of the dusty blond’s open lips, but something in the gaze answered it before Rogers even needed to ask. It was the first clear avenue of communication they’d exchanged so far. 

_No,_ Stephen’s eyes had said, _I couldn’t have just stayed home and let it happen, could I?_

_No,_ Steve’s replied. _Me neither._

Stephen used their pause to kick back the rest of the water he’d been offered, but kept the cup in his hands, resisting any impulse to ask for more. In spite of the stone still weighing around his neck, he knew that they really didn’t have the time. 

“That’s not even half of your given twenty questions,” Stephen said after a moment, the tension between them having changed tack during that silent exchange of understanding. “Don’t tell me you’re satisfied already - you thought I was an impostor an hour ago.” 

“I’m more satisfied than you might think,” Steve conceded casually, jarringly reaching into Stephen’s space in a flash of movement, only to retrieve the blanket that had been resting against the back of the chair. Even the cloak was too slow to have blocked it had it been a blow, but one of its corners took to hovering, coiled in serpentine warning of the result of any further incursions of space. Stephen was still the more perturbed of the two of them at the little display. Steve merely folded the blanket into a compact roll, knowingly oblivious to his infraction. 

“The insurgents have been using all kinds of pilfered tech - photostatic veils among them. The lists of the lost are common knowledge, and if you got your hands on the right servers before the internet went dark, you could choose to look like anyone.” The Captain did favor him with something akin to a smile, then. A distant cousin of one, maybe, or the grizzled uncle that whispered at adages like, _dead men tell no tales._ “Kinda hard to fake the lightshow, though. I haven’t had my ass handed to me like that since they broke out the cluster bombs for Baikonur last year.” 

“What happened in Baikonur?” 

“We closed the last of the space ports.” Steve left the rolled blanket on the desk, retreating back into the depths of the unlit outpost and returning with a rucksack while Stephen slowly stood, warring with indignant confusion and a growing sense of grudging necessity. “Better than the alternative." 

“And who exactly is _“we”_?” Stephen asked, putting the cup and the bloody rag next to the pitcher of water. Stephen realized with a start that the jar wasn’t full - it had only ever had enough water in it for one round in that lone cup. Textbook indeed. 

The temptation to turn over the down-facing photo frame was curtailed when Steve scooped it and the blanket into his bag. Now, as they stood shoulder to shoulder, Stephen was less keen on the notion of them being eye to eye. The two of them certainly weren’t the same _we_, but no longer was Stephen a part of the unspecified _alternative_ either. 

Where that left him, he had yet to feel enough to determine. 

“What’s left. Come on.” With that Steve put the string of beads around his wrist and doused the gas lantern, leaving Stephen to tumble back down the entryway after him, grateful for the cloak’s infinite and mysterious skill to steer him even in the dark. Had he been able to see Rogers as the man unbolted the heavy door between them and the rest of the world, he might have been tempted to throw him into it. He’d about had it with their game of short truths and long evasions. 

“I thought you said I wasn’t safe out here,” Stephen said, instead of tiring himself out with more trite answers to his weighted questions as they stepped out into the endless dark. He couldn’t tell if the night was growing hot, or if the chemical fire they’d passed earlier was drawing nearer. 

“You aren’t.” Steve looked back at him, his eyes sharp as they trailed down the length of the cloak. “Think you can do any better than being a complete walking bullseye?” 

“You didn’t complain about my fashion before,” Stephen griped, and the cloak rippled in offense but nonetheless variegated itself, its usually vibrant burgundy staining into striated black. It only liked that pattern when it was in an especially bad mood, and Stephen could sympathize with it. 

“Anyone who saw us would already know where this safehouse is.” Steve looked away as Stephen’s heart dove down into his heels. “But they need not to see where we’re going next. Think you can hustle? We have to cover ground fast.” 

“Is this _your_ version of hustling, or something resembling a human version?” 

A chuff was mirthlessly issued over the Captain’s shoulder as he turned. “The latter. My version of hustling isn’t very conducive to keeping you out of the booby traps.” 

“Charming.” Stephen was even more cautious to follow in the other’s exact tread, feeling very much the fool in the wake of the avenging angel. “And where exactly are we going?" 

“The citadel. Remember those five years of questions the world had to ask you?” Steve didn’t wait for him to reply, and for once Stephen didn’t have a witty rejoinder to challenge him with. “It’s their turn." 

Stephen looked up at the webbed spire for a split second instead. It winked back with fey starlight from a ridge an endless inky river of dead city and forest away from them. He wondered how little of the world - the cryptic _“rest”_ \- remained so as to fit under the pinpoint zenith of its tower. 

He didn’t need the Eye in the slightest - he already knew he wasn’t going to enjoy the answer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for taking slightly longer than anticipated in getting this chapter out, but I had the executive decision to make of where to end it, along with the executive nuisance of dealing with the holidays and getting my students to the end of semester. I'm going to do my utmost to stay as near to the 2-ish week update schedule as possible, but as with most schedules in my life, it will inevitably wiggle from time to time.
> 
> Also, if you can't tell, the underlying theme in this chapter is me taking painstaking joy in throwing Marvel canon out the window. It is only due to continue.


	3. All The Angels All The Devils - All Around Us Can't You See

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y'all ever just think about how much plots depend on the perfect coincidence of fortune? So say, what happens if a crash scene investigator just files away a certain Fury-held beacon rather than handing it over to the Avengers? What happens when a god-powered former pilot misses the window to salvage a ship adrift? And what _really_ happens when the world loses half of its population at total random?
> 
> IE: This is my creative wank at every what-if that could have gone wrong in Endgame but conveniently didn't. It's plot related, I promise...

Steve’s version of “hustling” officially sucked ass.

Or at least it did with an epic magic hangover, and judging by the way the cloak let him feel its weight by the time they did reach the back door to Wakanda’s last, greatest outpost, the relic readily agreed with him. Their journey up the ridge had been convoluted enough that even his photographic memory couldn’t have helped him make heads or tails of it again, let alone in the dark. Which was entirely the idea, he was sure. Secret hideouts tended not to stay that way unless they were inordinately difficult to access. This one certainly fit the bill.

Still, panting and in a cold sweat wasn’t exactly helping his mood once they accessed the tunnel hatch that finally harkened them returning to what was left of civilization. The spire of the citadel had disappeared some league behind them when they’d taken to a path made of nothing but jagged rock fall and towering jungle. Even as they entered the pitch dark passageway, the air was hardly climate controlled. Yet it was cooler than the forest damp, and left his skin clammy and nearing numb as he was again forced to rely on the cloak’s untenable night vision to make sure he was following in Rogers’ wake.

And just when he’d grown tired of catching only the most minute of glimpses of the man’s shoulders through silhouette, and arguably all of the other traps they were cautiously missing, they rounded a hairpin curve in the tunnel and were met with another door. The surface was naked of any markings, but he had no doubt it was armed to the teeth given it was lit to the point of menace. The spotlights at Checkpoint Charlie once upon a time could barely even compare, and the lack of gunslats or even seams in the metal surface told of a level of security he wouldn’t have wanted to even consider taking on without magic in his back pocket.

Steve stepped away from, turning to face him and nodding stiffly for him to step into center stage. He squinted up at the lights, trying to guess how many cameras and scanners were trained on him in that moment. And even for every magical sense he could extend beyond that wall, he had to settle himself into letting them know what they wanted to about him in that moment. The captain had mentioned the internet going dark, and that whoever had certain servers might as well have been kings over every detail that had been ever amassed about him, or anyone, online.

He was about to enter the high court, he supposed. The big answer as to what was left of the world he knew, and how much it knew of him.

After a moment of silent standing, a seam began to form in the face of the metal. A circular door opened up, surrounded by etchings in something similar to Tifinagh, though he didn’t have the time to parse out the semantic meaning of the symbols before Steve was on the move again. Stephen followed the deep impressions his boots left in the dirt, knowing that this of all places wasn’t where the traps ended.

It was just where the real tests began.

Even if he believed in the unlikely chance that they hadn’t been overheard back at Steve’s outpost, he held no auspices about privacy here. He’d entered their inner sanctum, in a word, and everything he had that they could lay eyes or ears or scanners on was verifiably no longer his own. In a distant and disturbing way, he was feeling maybe for the first time in his life that - insofar as his life and this universe’s version of his life were the same - his information was entirely the property of some stateless entity.

He wished that Captain America’s allegiance to them was comforting, but every ounce of the overwhelming lack of surety in his life made him cautious of such naive faith.

The wall re-coalesced behind them, fusing once more into one solid surface. He caught a bleak grim line from the tunnel they had just left before the doorway disappeared, doused in shadow once his spotlight had been turned off. For all the solid rock now beneath his feet, he felt far from steadied by it.

“Come on, we have an appointment to keep,” the soldier beckoned, and Stephen trudged after him with decreasing duty and increasing ire as they continued to wind uphill into the heart of the mountain.

“What,” he asked, sarcasm his last outlet for lack of other medium for his irritation, “with the Queen? You can’t exactly have been expecting me to arrive, given I wasn’t even expecting to arrive.”

“We’ve learned to be quick on our feet when the unexpected crops up,” Steve muttered darkly, surely intending to be too low to hear. Stephen let him have that one, figuring if he had to ask one more time what had occurred to earn such a comment, he’d get as much of an answer out of Rogers as he would out of a mountain.

This mountain, at least, _was_ talking to him, albeit not in words.

Instead it was speaking in energy, singing with power and life the likes of which he would have found hard to picture given the pallid world outside. But the power wasn’t coming from the living earth - not anymore. What the ground had to give it had already willingly sacrificed, but there was energy nonetheless, held in channels, currents of life force transmuted into a form lovingly and judiciously rationed. 

The mountain had given up its secrets, down to the very last.

By the time they exited the cruder tunnels and entered increasingly developed areas, Stephen knew that for as empty as the stone was, the compound they wove through was not. Abandonment came with a certain smell, or lack thereof. But as they walked Stephen thought he could smell spice wafting up from one of the branching corridors, and something like ozone and clean water in others. Humanity was still in this place, and in far better shape here than in the chaos outside.

Finally, they entered a fully-fledged corridor, the floors and walls dimly lit panes, windows into the yesterday, rather than neatly hewn bedrock. The glass lined workspaces within were filled with screens and equipment he couldn’t make heads or tails of, save one alcove he recognized instantly as a surgical space. Some things never looked different.

When they came to a sprawling laboratory space at the base of a helical structure, Rogers finally slowed his pace, standing aside to follow Stephen with his eyes as he made a bee line to lean against one of the emptier work tables. He put as much of his weight against it as he could, turning back to the Captain with the last of his patience, and energy, hanging by a thread.

“So,” he said when he’d finally caught his breath, “where’re the rest? Here you made me think that I would be dealing with quite the interrogation.”

“Coming,” was all Steve supplied, though Stephen was absolute in his certainty that Rogers hadn’t contacted anyone on their ascent into the bowels of the citadel. At least, not by any means he could think of. “Besides,” he said, finally swiveling to face him, “I’m not done with my Twenty Questions yet.”

“Oh Christ,” Stephen muttered, crossing his arms over his chest. He did his best to ignore the uncomfortable murmuring of his heartbeat. “What now?”

“According to every record we had, you went off the grid in 2015. One last plane ticket and customs crossing in Nepal, and then you vanished. What remained of your estate was processed according to your living will, and you were legally declared dead. Until you turned up in Central Park in 2018 with Bruce Banner, and less than two hours later disappeared again, this time into space. Stark went in pursuit of you, and it was confirmed that Spider-Man accompanied him in the rescue attempt, but none of you came back.” Stephen waited him out, keeping his gaze consistently on Steve’s face, refusing to give one more inch of himself until he’d actually been posed a question. He’d seen what had become of his counterpart. _Tony. Peter._ “Quite a wardrobe change, going from scrubs and suits to… whatever your get-up is called.”

“Keep making quips about my clothes, and they _will_ get offended.” The cloak gave a hearty ripple, shimmering starkly back into its normal burgundy. It was its version of flipping Rogers off, probably. Stephen approved.

“What we all wanted to know is how the hell the world’s former leading neurosurgeon and neuroscientist went from a penniless tourist to a… magician.” That exact term seemed to pain Rogers, given while saying it his mouth was twisted like he’d taken a bite out of a fresh-picked crabapple. “And from what we’ve come to know, a powerful one at that.” 

“_Wanted_ to know?”

Steve gave him that vaguely pleased squint again, which indicated some other undefined milestone was crossed. “What I want to know now is whether you’re carrying the Infinity Stone you were entrusted with.”

“You really have done your homework,” Stephen commended, desperate to cover being put off his feet by the directness of the inquiry. True, if Thanos had already come and gone, knowledge of the Infinity Stones was rote material. But that in and of itself was hardly soothing. “Well…” 

_How do I even begin to explain this? The first time I tried, Christine made fun of me for sounding like a Bob Seger song._

And Bob Seger had certainly never had _his_ experience in Kathmandu.

“I think you actually _still_ don’t want my sob story,” Stephen continued after a moment, looking back up from the floor where his gaze had sunk to with the sudden understanding that it had been a baited inquiry, meant to elicit more than it actually asked for. Steve’s stalwart attention didn’t waver, but he also didn’t argue the point.

“And the Time Stone…” He pulled at the thick cord tying the Eye of Agamotto to his neck. He didn’t bring the talisman out completely - just enough to show its light and vent some of its vengeful heat out of his tunic. The contrast of his chilled skin against the hot metal was nearly unbearable, and baring it definitely eased some of his discomfort. Or at least, one of his discomforts. “Yes, I have it.”

He didn’t bother trying to inveigle which stone it was: past a very early point, which Rogers and his ilk were very obviously beyond, it was simple deduction and thus made chicanery moot. All of the information they had on him stripped the truth they wanted naked. But not his truth.

Rogers was silent for a pregnant moment, his gaze on the floor now and yet again seeming lost in the shadows around their feet. Stephen was startled when he spoke, rather expecting him to hold the pause until the others arrived.

“If we use that thing... Go back in time and stop it, would it fix this?”

Stephen sighed for him.

_If only it were so simple._

Then, Stephen grimaced. The man obviously still thought that time worked in a linear fashion - that events had a single path. Only one route, one contingency that, if un-written or prevented, erased potential futures and gave the present a miracle cure. Stephen might have, in more bitter moments, wished that it worked that way, but in this case it was to the saving grace of many that time didn’t work in such a way. Time worked in fractals - slices splintering off of each possible event ever, in all of creation, but still connected to the shared events that brought them about.

“Short answer: no. Longer answer: still no and for complex reasons.”

Rogers stared at him, a flat, unamused line judging him from within his beard. _By the Vishanti_ the beard was weird. Though, not bad. Just weird. “Try me.”

He did roll his eyes this time. He didn’t even bother trying to help it. He rested his arms low under his sternum, folding his hands close against his flanks, protectively hiding his weakness under his arms. His usual tremble had been upgraded to a precarious shake - the energy deficit was beginning to hit home now that the adrenaline was washing out of his system. He didn’t know if he could afford to let it.

“There are certain ways you can travel within a set timeline and take particular kinds of action,” he began, their words crossing in the space between them but not their gazes. “But fundamentally, for the timeline to remain contiguous, major events need to remain intact. If you instigate a major change, a world-altering change, then that timeline branches away from the one that generated change. That new, supposedly amended timeline therefore exists separately from the causality that formed it, while still being tied to it by a splinter of paradox.”

At least Steve’s brows were raised now when he glanced over at him. Stephen narrowly resisted the urge to say, “_I told you so._”

“I’ll put it this way,” he continued, deciding to take diplomatic pity in spite of very much not feeling like it. “Say you come with me, and we go back in this timeline and change events. Stop Thanos.” 

_Fuck knows how..._

“_This,_” he said, circling a finger at the vaulted ceiling, and the horrible night-world beyond, “still exists.”

“How?” Steve asked. “If we stop Thanos, this doesn’t happen.”

“_In that universe._ But _this_ timeline will still need to have happened, it will still need to exist in order to generate the _you_ that meets _me_ and goes back in time.” _And that partnership is a stretch, make no mistake._ “That new timeline, the one sans Thanos, is dependent on the existence of and the intervention from the timeline where Thanos succeeded. _You_ become a paradox that the new dimension depends on in order to exist.” 

_But it doesn’t save **you**, the you that had to suffer through all this, he thought. It only saves another you from ever having to go through it. But you and he and I will never be so lucky as to be the same._

“It’s a feedback loop,” Steve summarized, a familiar, frustrated understanding of necessity in his voice. Stephen’s entire explanation had been made in that same tone. “The new timeline might go on as if Thanos never happened, but this one will stay the way it is because it has to in order to form the other timeline.”

“That’s the gist of it, yes.”

The super soldier nodded solemnly, the disappointment sinking deep into the crevasse of despair Stephen could see just beneath the last veil of his heroic exterior. His timeline was doomed to exist. It had to, if only because it had to be a part of what Stephen saw that inspired him to leave his own dimension. The magics knew it, but Stephen didn’t like it any more than Steve did.

In a moment of obscure and striking homesickness, he pondered over the fact that dimension hopping was infinitely more complicated than Mordo had ever scolded him over. Because it wasn’t just cause and effect, an easy point-a-to-point-b evolution. Even time loops seemed simple by comparison. When it started to involve interdimensional dependency it just got… squishy. 

The warnings in the books didn’t include that paradoxes were a part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Omniverse.

Thankfully, before Steve could continue with his ad-hoc lesson in temporal multi-dimensional theory, the door to the lab space opened, and the whole royal cabal entered. Familiar and unfamiliar faces, along with a healthily intimidating set of armored warriors cloistered around a regal woman in white. The warriors’ eyes were all that was trained on him for now, though he was sure that would change in the blink of an eye should he give their weapons the opportunity.

Where the lab had been hauntingly empty before, now it felt choked by the sudden influx of people, and Stephen realized all too late that he had incidentally placed himself right in the middle of it all. It seemed to be a running theme in this dimension, stepping into the middle of it.

“You are Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange,” the stately woman at the center of the envoy addressed, stepping forward from the flanks of her army in a swirl of ivory robing. A trail of less immediately armed persons followed in her wake. “Gone these five years, now returned, and yet not yourself.”

“Yes, Queen Mother Ramonda. That is the crux of it,” he agreed, sensing startlement among the crowd. “I am myself, but not as you know me. As you are yourself, but not as I know you.”

Wakanda’s Queen Mother nodded to that, and he retroactively regretted his flippant comment about meeting with the Queen. As it turns out, he was. Just not the queen he had been prodding at.

“I fear I never chanced to _know_ Doctor Strange,” she continued, her company forming a stately circle around him, in whose background Steve Rogers stood merely as a shadowy vanguard. “Certainly I have come to know your name, your history. All those pretty files the internet used to produce.” Her eyes scanned him, deeply fraught with loss, but finally altogether seeing what was in front of her without needing the explanations Rogers had. 

Probably she had already heard the explanations he’d given. Memos traveled fast, it seemed. But there was keen perception with her, a distinct lack of damning hope placed on his shoulders. Instead she was merely curious, and justifiably so.

“I never knew _that_ man.” She didn’t smile, but something in the planes of her face told of amusement all the same. “For as many files as you can hold on a man, files are not rules, and they do not rule men. Patterns cannot be trusted to overpower people. And from our records of you in this universe, Doctor Strange, it has become our assessment that you were wont of being _unpredictable._” She was certainly every ounce of keen orator, waxing diplomat, and cutthroat warrior that a true queen needed to be to see through both impossible lies and equally impossible, true unlikelihoods. “Therefore, I cannot claim to know you at all.”

“Aside from the fact that you have the same blood type, exact pupil and iris topography, and DNA sequencing,” another woman continued, her chocolate, gold, and vermillion armor war-scarred and brilliant. “No planet-side cloning is that good. So you’re either telling the truth, or a very convincing alien.” 

“You took my fucking DNA from that little clay cup?” _Quick on your feet indeed,_ he thought, pleased when a few in the assembled group had the decency to look spooked by his sudden uptake. “Impressive that you can sequence it that fast, but then you did just drag my ass up a mountain so I guess you had _some_ time.” He surveyed the room, arch, but terminally unamused. “Are you going to offer me more water so you can finish your scan, or are we going to talk about what the hell happened finally?”

“We will share the truth with you in a moment, Doctor Strange,” said the Queen Mother, the picture of patience as she nodded to the stern woman guarding her. “My general, Okoye. Those around us are the last of Wakanda’s armies, and some of our allied Outsiders: Colonel James Rhodes, formerly of the United States Air Force; Virginia Potts, of Stark United; and Commander Everett Ross, formerly of the CIA.”

Someone in Steve’s vicinity cleared their throat, and Potts added a kind, “And Harold Hogan, also of Stark United.” The Queen Mother withdrew to a chair provided her as Potts stepped forward, her copper hair the only splash of unbridled color he’d seen aside from the chemical fire burning in the hills outside. Everything else of these people was battle-stained and battered, even their eyes.

“I… understand that we’ve confirmed you’re not from this universe,” she said, some of her previous CEO candor falling out from under her with the strange vocabulary. And under the weight of hard, skeptical glances from rather a lot of people in the room. “Or at least, we’re willing to consider your claims to that end. Our primary belief in your sincerity is that you really don’t seem to know what’s happened.” She paused, her bright eyes searching him as he searched her.

_Wong was always the one with the poker face, not me. I talk shit when I’m scared... And when I’m not. Which I guess can make it hard to tell._

“Which, to be fair to both you and us,” Potts carried on, apparently having found her rhythm amid the strangeness, “could be true of your situation, _or_ if this universe’s version of you really has come back.”

He nodded in understanding. Finally at least someone was talking straight to him rather than around him. He cast Rogers a furtive glance, finding him not even deigning him with his attention, focused instead on the faces of the Wakandan warriors, as if committing them to memory.

“To be honest with all of you, I wish it were true that I was your Stephen Strange, and came with better tidings than I do,” he said, seeing a distinct lack of motion in the room that belied their having overheard all of his curt explanations to Steve so far. And like Ramonda, told of how little they were relying on him for a miracle solution.

Surely if he was lying, they were at least agreeing, he was being consistent about it. 

“Where are we at in debriefing you so far?” the general of the Dora Milaje questioned, more to give him a chance to put a hand on the rudder of the conversation than not knowing the answer. Her purposeful straightforwardness was an equally welcome breath of fresh conversational air. At least someone had sensed his patience had worn down to the bone.

“So far,” Stephen said primly, not bothering to glancing back over at where Steve was avoiding him from the wings, “I’ve been told that you lost. Miserably.”

Potts actually smiled at that, and he recognized it as the first smile he’d been offered in the dimension. Even if it was a holocaust smile, in the end. “It’s hard to capture the devastation of the Snap… facts and figures tend to feel trite when we’ve seen it from the ground up.”

“Try me.”

The redhead didn’t seem to fit in her neat navy fatigues, but she nonetheless seemed to have come to peace with them. “Not all population centers were affected equally. London lost less than five of its fifteen million. Moscow lost seven of its twelve. DC lost sixty-seven percent of its population, Los Angeles only forty-four percent. The Polynesian archipelagos barely got hit, but major industrial centers in India lost anywhere from one to one-point-two billion.”

She sighed, there, albeit needlessly. Stephen could more than read between the lines even before she continued. “Global commerce went into a tailspin, and when the nuclear strikes started in the States, the world governments folded like a house of cards. Trade, intelligence, the UN - all goes to the highest bidder and the heaviest hitter.”

“In the States?” Stephen asked, feeling the long-standing horror that had been poisoning him reach new and chilling lows. _That_ he had not expected. Hadn’t even seen. “From whom?”

Potts and Rhodes exchanged a heavy look before refusing to meet any of the Wakandan’s sympathetic glowers.

The realization of their guilt shot through him like an electric charge. “You’ve _got_ to be shitting me. How did that happen?” he barked, all of their shared miserable commiseration sparking an unusually abrupt and feverish anger in him. “They’re supposed to have security measures on security measures to stop that from happening!”

“Lockheed lost eleven of its fifteen board members. Cheyenne Mountain, thirty percent of its staff. The US Navy only lost six percent; two percent were heavy-hitters in the command structure; one percent alone went with their nuclear submarine staff. The powers at be - the ones that were left, anyway - were desperate to get people to fill those vacuums, and put in whoever they had on hand,” the squat blond man, Ross, said, his voice weary with derision and disappointment and despair. He had to have been a career G-Man at some point in his past, Stephen decided, with the shadow of a fallen government that lingered around his throat. “And the people on hand were more easily swayed than their predecessors. In the death throes of the stock market and open monetary exchange, it was every man for themselves. The right was baying for the throats of the left, and the left baying for the throats of the right.”

“And a lot of someones decided it would be a great idea to take out their political enemies, I’m guessing,” Stephen summarized. He understood then why the figures didn’t feel cold on paper or in person. They were bright, and agonizing.

“San Francisco. Seattle. Minneapolis. Baltimore,” Rhodes picked up, pulling along the story like the weary band of American refugee minstrels they were. “It would have been better if Yellowstone had blown and put a stop to the in-fighting.”

Stephen shook his head, burying his face in a shaking hand. He wasn’t sure if the cold sweat he was still in was from the shock, his plummeting blood pressure, or the gallows humor.

“The only reason DC and New York City got off was because the conservatives were sensitive enough to not want to tread on 9/11’s memory,” Ross spat, the vicious statement rattling up from his kevlar-clad chest.

He took in a deep breath, letting his arm fold back against his side. The cloak curled closer, protecting his hands. When he lifted his head, the silence in the room was from a legion of tight lips. For once, he didn’t want to hear more, but when he met Potts’ gaze, he knew there was more to be said.

“Stark Industries went into global outreach in the wake of the collapse of global trade, and Wakanda became our base of operations after New York and Los Angeles closed their walls. We still have people on the inside, but…” she shook her head, her hands clasping in front of her. She was too penitent, in Stephen’s opinion, for someone who’d poured everything they had into keeping the world together. Regardless of success or failure. “It became too hard to move. Under the new martial laws, internal security and civic privacy became impossible to sustain.”

“Almost impossible,” a disembodied voice supplied, a faint Celtic lilt to its soft amusement.

It still made Stephen jump like a frightened cat.

Potts and Rhodes were smiling, but there was a deep sadness between them that Stephen couldn’t unpack. “Doctor Strange, meet FRIDAY - Stark United’s primary artificial intelligence. FRIDAY was responsible for closing down the internet when the United States threatened to privatize and weaponize it.”

Stephen wanted to know which pundit was responsible for that bright idea, specifically so he could take a bat to their frontal cortex. Repeatedly.

“Was it that bad?” he asked, watching as the faces around the room all turned away by fractions. “The entire internet being an all or nothing factor… that’s just...” _Impossible? Dystopic?_ “Hard to swallow.”

“So was the appropriation of the UN, up until their tanks showed up at the Wakandan border three weeks ago,” Ross muttered, though he didn’t sound unsympathetic to Stephen’s assessment. In fact, he seemed to share his feelings to a canny exactness. “You’re going to have to get used to the impossible being our reality, Strange.”

The underlying, _every painstaking part of it_, came through in spite of not being spoken aloud.

“Wait, you mean the UN equipment was being used to incur into Wakanda? Under whose authority, Putin’s?” he asked, his heart high enough in his throat to feel like it was just under his ears. Disbelief, indignation. It didn’t begin to cover it. He’d known scores of doctors who had earned their laurels and their consecutive decades of research grant money from services rendered to UN programs. They would have keeled over dead before serving a UN that had the balls to raid a country like Wakanda for nothing better than monetary gain… he hoped.

The Wakandan general issued a guttural hiss of syllables even he couldn’t parse out.

“It doesn’t take a genius to know _that_ was one hell of an expletive,” Stephen murmured, certifiably impressed. He’d have to remember that one.

Okoye’s smile was both feral and demure. “It means _hillbillies_.” 

“Our buddy Vladimir is our last recourse, should we lose this battle,” Potts said, her tone airy, almost wistful. Oddly enough, no one in the room seemed to agree with her, including a super soldier in the back with his mustache pulled into a frown. “And into his arms we will have to find our way, if any of us get out alive.”

“Romanoff and Barton are out in Mongolia trying to find him,” Ross added, his scowl a far cry from approving of the prospect of kissing up to Russia’s kingpin. “They’ve holed up in the tomb of Genghis Khan - thought that was where he might be, but we haven’t heard back. Either way, if we lose, that’ll be our next base of operations. Banner, Thor, and JOCASTA have also gone off the grid in the middle Pacific.”

“Wait, you _found_ the tomb of Chinggis Khan?” Stephen asked, knowing that Wong would be green with envy at finding out someone had beaten him to the punch of his favorite archaeological mystery. That thought hurt, probably just as much as it should have.

“The Mongolian version of Fish Wildlife & Parks went the way of the dodo. Along with the American version,” the blond former agent confirmed, having softened enough to look halfway amused. “They’d been sitting on the secret for decades, but with no one around to keep people out, it was a pretty quick reveal. We got there in time to keep all the gold from being raided.”

“Not that we aren’t using it ourselves,” Okoye muttered, not so much disapproving as grudgingly truthful. The phrase “every man for themselves” didn’t just apply to the villains, then. Pragmatism made plunderers of even the heroes.

Stephen palmed his forehead, pulling shaking fingers through painful, sweaty tangles in his hair to get it away from his face. Regardless of the air control, if they had any, he felt like the world was closing in around his head like a rush of dark water. He’d thought he couldn’t be drowned in any more dread.

He was wrong.

“And what exactly is _this battle_ for?” His voice was an echo in his own head, shallow, faded as if coming from the surface of whatever hell he was sinking into. The question was him backtracking up a chain, trying to find the boat attached to the anchor, or the other way around.

“Me.”

Stephen didn’t know how an AI could sound guilty, but that was the only emotion that single word was colored with.

“The citadel is one of the last places complex enough to house FRIDAY’s systems and store all of the data. We… were trying to design a way to compact her, make it easier for us to move.” Pepper and the Queen Mother shared a look, the two women holding up the world that was falling apart in their palms. “But it seems like we’ve run out of time.”

“Which is why we _really_ hope Barton and Romanoff have found Putin.” Rhodes had been quiet, but his sincerity finally found a home the drawn, wistful expression on his face that Stephen finally recognized. FRIDAY was the last piece of Tony Stark still in their lives, and his attachment to her had nothing to do with the impending apocalypse - he was acclimatized to the disaster.

He had never acclimatized to the loss.

“We are also seeking to remove our energy resources from the hands of the enemy.” There was a vicious clarity in Ramonda’s statement. She may be a stateswoman now, but that didn’t prevent her from having a warlord’s guile. “I will not have Wakanda’s final treasure feeding their wars.”

“The energy from the mountain. What is it?” he asked.

He became aware, from the frigid pause that echoed around the lab, that this was information that would not have been freely given in any other circumstances. And that even in the current situation, it was still being heavily reconsidered.

“This was the site of our largest vibranium mine. The generator… the most powerful one in the world.” There was the phantom of another missing person in that statement, but he dutifully avoided expressing sympathy for the wetness in the Queen Mother’s eyes. It wasn’t his place to give it. “And it must be destroyed, should the incursion be successful.”

“Oh,” Stephen exhaled, voice low as all the pieces finally began to form a picture. Ramonda and Okoye focused on him sharply, where the Americans in the room just looked befuddled. “You’re in a stalemate.” _Trapped, more like, and none of you want to say it._ “If they get to the citadel, they know you’ll destroy the generator. But you can’t abandon it, either, until you know you’ve got recourse for FRIDAY’s systems.” He considered for a moment. “What about the vibranium itself? Aren’t you worried about them getting their hands on it?”

“The mountain has been emptied of ore,” Okoye replied, peering at him out of the corner of her eyes as she stalked a slow circle around him. Her adjutants didn’t move, and Stephen would have almost preferred if they did. “The problem we face is emptying it of the energy, and the intelligence.”

“You have more energy than you can transport, then.” The AI’s requirements he had no means of estimating, and no immediate means of helping. And he wasn’t going to pretend to be an expert in a room of people who could see straight through his platitudes. That would only do pointless disservice to his own friend, and the one these had lost.

“Yes,” she said. “But now _you_ are here.”

There was something markedly obvious in that statement, but Stephen didn’t like the portrait it was painting regardless. Not one bit.

“No.”

Okoye gave him that fey smile again, and it made him want to back up out of its striking distance. “You told the Captain that your… spellcraft takes phenomenal amounts of energy,” she recited, and it silenced the interruption sitting between his molars. “As it happens, we have energy to get rid of.”

“No, I can’t-”

“Sorcerer.”

The general’s cold eyes gleamed at him with a fierceness that schooled him back to silence. “We have prepared for the light to go out. We do not fear the dark that will come. And whether you came or not, in days or weeks, it would be gone forever all the same.”

_Gone_, he thought, his eyes memorizing every face in the room regardless of whether or not they were looking to him as the solution to one of their innumerable problems. In fact, he might have lingered longer on those who weren’t… save one super soldier, whose gaze he’d finally recaptured. _But maybe not beyond the reach of one last helping hand._

“We have done all we can,” Ramonda agreed, and Potts nodded from her place at her side. Stephen marveled at their certainty, given the only thing he gave freely and without skepticism was a buck-fifty to the kids when they sold Minute Maid lemonade on the corners during summer in the Village. That they were willing to hand him over the crown power grid was not quite as hard to believe as the demise of the internet, but only by a hair. “We must find our own way now. Time will not make a difference.”

Stephen grimaced, his adam’s apple bobbing over the hard indecision in his throat. 

Logically, personally, fundamentally - she was right.

He hated it.

“One more white guy isn’t going to save the world,” Stephen supplied, raising a hopeful, skeptical brow. It was a cheap shot, but it earned a fresh, exuberant tide of laughter from the room where he was expecting sobriety. He chose to memorize their faces this way - with some spiritual light pulled back into them by an idiot with a poor sense of humor. Or maybe, rather, just a sense of humor none of them had the liberty to entertain in five years.

“In most cases,” Okoye agreed, a phantom grin lighting up the roots of long-forgotten smile lines on her face. “I am willing to accept the occasional extraordinary exception.”

He looked hard at the general, at Potts, at the Queen Mother. The cloak’s collar was curled, flattening against his collarbones, showing the weak point of his neck where he wished it wouldn’t. But it knew human behavior better than he did at times - its intuition trustworthy. In this circumstance, he despised that too. Regardless of how loyally and protectively it remained clasped against his arms, and gently helping to cradle his hands when he chose to rest them.

“You cannot save us from this fate. But you can save others,” the Queen Mother continued, and he felt like she was ever so slowly twisting the knife she’d buried between his ribs. She was facing her warriors, their patchwork of uniforms - blue cloaks, ribbed red linens, green water suits, bronze chest plates, fur-lined armor, indigo robes, gold spears - cleaving to her entreaty. These were the vestiges of _millennia_ around her, the lineage of her country’s ancient forces buried in the ground. Ground actively being desecrated by the enemy. 

They were all here because survival was the greatest rebellion they had left, and like the mountain, they would give up everything they had to achieve it.

And he, a wild card, one stray hair out of place in the web of this universe, was a solution to one of their problems. Not all.

Just one.

_Oh god_, he thought. _I hate that **most**._

“I… I’m sorry,” he forced out, knowing that whatever had become of himself in this universe, it was just one of a million apologies they were owed. Yet it was the only thing he could find to say. Finally, brutally, all of his questions had been answered. And prepared for the terror as he’d been, he’d been far less prepared for the depths of the remorse he genuinely felt for these people. For his lack of ability to amend their situation, where his vain desire had been to just go out and… fix it all. He couldn’t, and they’d recognized it sooner than he had. They had already forgiven him, before he’d even realized his sin. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop this.”

“This was not your making, sorcerer,” Ramonda chided as he might have her eldest child seeking rulership guidance. He wasn’t sure he wanted the rulership she was guiding him in, but he’d take the guidance all the same. “What you make of this knowledge, _that_ is your provenance.” 

Steve had wound through the crowd, withdrawing from the shadows and standing shoulder to shoulder with the Wakandan general. Their countenances, the flow of their personal desires, were an odd pair: Yin and Yang; pull and push; go and stay.

“No pressure,” Steve supplied wryly, looking Stephen up and down in a way he wasn’t sure was exactly edifying. A tall slip of a man with the Omniverse on his shoulders probably wasn’t the most striking and reassuring image. Especially not one on the verge of hypoglycemic shock.

Yet here they were. Half a day into his re-existence and new existence entirely, taking it in stride, and using it to their advantage. Processing, categorizing, assessing, utilizing, prioritizing. He might as well have been an aurora bridge to Timbuktu.

And just as the rainbow bridge, he was more than that, and they could see it. But they knew, like an escape route from the heavens, that what he could do was limited. Finite, to them.

And yet infinite for others, if they helped him get along.

Stephen skimmed the room, searching for disapproval, for blame, in the dim light from the last free generator in the world lighting them. The pale white didn’t reach into the darkness of the mine shafts, and surely couldn’t replace the sunlight he wished this world could revel in rather than recoil against.

Rogers came and stood next to him then, undoubtedly drinking in his conflict. He hoped the view would let the man sleep at night, what nights any of them had left upon his departure.

“Which is why you’re not going alone.”

Stephen felt a jolt of _something_ crackle up his spine so intense it made his skin flash in a sudden ache. He rubbed at the back of his neck, turning to the super soldier, tattered uniform and all, wondering what the hell he’d just hallucinated.

“_What?_”

“This spell.” Steve sounded like he’d suddenly acquired authority on the subject, which made Stephen bristle, especially in the wake of his answers being quoted back at him. _Again_. “It requires you to break ties with your dimension. So you’re alone, set out to sea trying to figure this out on your own.” There was no reproach in Steve’s tone, only a smug self-recognition Stephen was entirely un-fond of. “If it worked on you, it can work on others, right?”

“Captain-”

“Take it from me, one-man missions usually end only one way, and that’s not what the universes need from you.” Steve’s eyes turned down for a moment, the light from the lab making the blue of his eyes seem navy. “You’re going to need help.”

“And what about the people that need help _here_?” he asked, his biting tone echoing back at him from dead stone. “I’m already taking enough, _if_ I take the power from the generator, I don’t need-”

“Bull_shit_ you don’t.”

Stephen ground his teeth, rolling his eyes skyward with so much fervor he had to close them under furrowed brows. He stood up, unfolding his arms in a vain attempt to both feel less small and up to the challenge of having this conversation. “I swear to god if you interrupt me one more time I _will_ hit you.” _I will regret it, but will still find at least temporary satisfaction in it._

Steve cocked a hip against the lab surface, every tilted angle of his body adding to his smug victory. “I’ll stop interrupting with you when you start listening to reason.”

“Oh please, _do_ elaborate on how you think me excising you from your own timeline is a _good_ idea,” he snapped, recalling all too well how inadequate Rogers’ understanding of multiversality was. There was no way the man could fathom what he was offering. 

Stephen didn’t even know all of what it entailed for himself, and he was not indecently informed on the subject.

“For the same reason you’re going to take the energy from this generator - because it won’t change what’s happened here,” the blond continued, undeterred and annoyingly direct in pinning Stephen’s indecision down like an expert lepidopterist would a butterfly to a cork-board. Maybe he had considered the implications, he could grudgingly admit. More quickly and more accurately than he’d expected. “But me coming with you, it can change things elsewhere.”

“So can you staying to change things here!” Stephen bellowed, perhaps for the first time on this earth raising his voice. It ricocheted back at him, staring him in the face just like every stunned face in the room. “And that’s something I _can’t_ do.”

There was a high whistle in his ears as he stood there, stealing this world’s clean air. The sudden spike in adrenaline had kicked out the bottom of his reserves, but he stood, ramrod straight. Refusing to list under the equal truth of his perspective. Rogers’ furrowed brows and slack jaw told him he’d struck an equal, emotional blow.

If they went in for another bout, Stephen knew he would lose.

“Come with me.”

Potts’ tone was clipped, the command axing through the stand-off. She wasn’t, however, talking to Steve.

Her firm, but unexpectedly cool focus was entirely on him.

The cloak nudged his legs into motion, and he grudgingly trailed after her as she led them up the helical walkway to a second level. A small office sat in the column, and the murmur of new conversations starting behind their backs silenced when the glass closed behind them. Stephen’s skin was still prickling, and not just with the desperate desire to know what was being said.

“Take a seat,” she said, motioning toward the circular table in the center as she moved to a panel on the wall, playing in a command that resulted in a bottle of hideously blue liquid being spit from it. When she turned to face him, he had sagged onto its surface.

She held out the bottle, and he looked at it, then at her for a long enough moment that she shrugged her shoulders at his unspoken question. “Your blood sugar was tanking. If you kept at it with Steve, you’d have ended up swooning.” She quirked a smile at him. “Not the best way to win an argument.”

It was cool in his hands as he unwound the topper. “What is this, Wakandan Gatorade?”

“It’s Kool-Aid, actually,” she replied, and chuckled when she saw his imminent surprise. “Seriously. The powder and sugar are easier to transport than a case of Gatorade. Plus the powder doesn’t expire.” 

“No Michelin stars for this joint,” he muttered, but took a few long swigs of it anyway. It harkened to a childhood he didn’t have the time or heart to linger on. He could feel without even pretending to glance in her direction that Potts was watching his every move. Practically, probably making sure she didn’t need to catch him if he fainted. 

Realistically, it felt like she still wanted the answers he couldn’t give her, of what had become of her boss, her friend. She was, however, above that impulse, regardless of how much it clearly plagued her.

“You should do it.”

_So much for detente_, he thought.

“It’s the only thing I can do for you,” he said, and even with the taste of sugar and the untenable flavor that was “blue” on his tongue, those words still tasted bitter. “I left my world to help. And whatever I can do… Yes, I’ll do it.” _Even if it feels like highway robbery rather than a mission of aid_.

“I wasn’t talking about the energy.”

Stephen’s eyes scanned the room below, the soldiers rallying around their queen and general. The last of the Americans had kept Rogers backed against the table he’d taken to occupying in Stephen’s wake. By the expressions on Rhodes’ and Ross’ faces, they were leveling him with some hard questions. Probably to the tune of, _What the hell are you thinking?_

But Steve’s expression was calm, and without realizing it, Stephen had stood to gather close to the curved panes closing them off from their words. There was no uncertainty in his responses, not the flicker of an eyelash or a twitch in his crossed arms. Not anymore.

“He should care more about protecting the rest of you.” Potts drew up next to him, looking down at her dwindling revolution like an iron queen. She wasn’t to be broken. Dented, scratched, shaken, battered, and burned, perhaps. But broken, no. “Not about…” _Some idiot with a death wish? A realist with a bad habit of optimism? A walking guilt complex waiting to happen?_ “Me.”

“You know, Tony always wanted to make me a suit,” she said, her voice wet but steady. The shift put him off his footing, but he couldn’t but give her his sympathy. “Now I wish more than anything I would have let him.”

“If it’s any consolation,” he murmured, not wanting to tread in a dead man’s footsteps, “even foresight can’t always keep us away from all the monsters.”

She smiled at him, her blued gray eyes glassy and entertained by his argumentative demise. “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I’m glad you came. You’ve given everyone here hope that this isn’t the end. That even if this world has to bear the burden, others don’t have to.”

“That this world has to bear the burden _isn’t better_,” he bit back, his throat thick with a sob he wouldn’t inflate and give credence to.

“No, Stephen, it’s reality. A reality that you stepped into the middle of,” she corrected, rapping a knuckle against the bottle just as his ears were beginning to ring again. “You said it yourself - there’s no road back for us from here. And we can’t expect you to waste what power you have seeing it through to the end with us.”

They’d learned to balance selfishness and selflessness for so long that he couldn’t help but marvel at their practically intuitive balance of it. His sense of both was in a freefall, and he didn’t foresee it getting easier with time and exposure.

“Why,” he asked, tiredly, doggedly, “do you think this is even a good idea?”

“Because,” Pepper said. She was looking at him so keenly he could feel it boring into his bones. Could feel the destiny tying him to her wisdom, even if he didn’t agree. “If you can save Tony, me, _anyone_ from all the other monsters out there… it’s worth it.”

“And I’ll need more than a wooden spoon to do it,” he muttered, shaking his head at the floor. His eyes ached as he rested them behind closed lids.

She laughed at him, sudden and delighted. “What does _that_ mean?”

He laughed too, gurgling and tired, remembering a woman a world and a lifetime ago who had told her children stories when they woke up afraid of the darkness in an old farmhouse a nowhere away from anywhere. “It’s just something my mom used to say,” he answered, not sure if it was because he was talking about a dead woman, or because it didn’t really hurt as much compared to this universe’s troubles. _And isn’t that novel_. “‘Don’t worry,’ she always told us. ‘Monsters’ ultimate weakness is wooden spoons.’ I think she meant the monsters under the bed…” Pepper’s hand rested at the crux of his elbow, finally a welcome anchor. He didn’t linger on everything it could have meant, if he stayed. “Not the kind we deal with.”

She hummed, and it was a kind sound. “I think I would have used that, if I ever had kids,” she said, leaving her hand where it traitorously tempted his deeper sentiments. “But you are going to need more than a wooden spoon… or a fancy piece of jewelry.”

“Oh stop,” he begged, smiling harder by the minute in spite of himself. “Captain _hashtag_-’Murica out there has given me enough flack about my clothes today.”

“Ah, but _I’m_ criticizing your accessories.” They stared at each other for a long moment. Something calm, resigned, and warm settled around them. They both looked down at Steve.

Steve was looking up at them, waiting. Expectant.

_Ready to go._

“If he comes with me… he may never come back.”

Pepper didn’t seem even the slightest ruffled by the implication. The dearth of experience weighed under her eyes as she finally let him go and turned away. “The others never came back either, Stephen. At least we know what we’re giving him up for, this time.”

He didn’t have the heart to ask her again if she thought it was worth it. It would have been a needless insult to both her authority and her sacrifice.

He followed her back out of the office, kicking back the rest of his bootlegged Kool-Aid, and feeling both physically and emotionally less akimbo than when he’d entered. He still wasn’t in great shape, but then again, he considered, he was about to get a ten course energy meal. He couldn’t waste his appetite on an appetizer.

The gentle susurrus of conversation quieted when they rejoined the throng. There was no suspense in the room, just patience.

The way back to Steve parted for them. It didn’t make the way to Steve’s thinking any easier for him - he had never been especially close with Steve Rogers back in his own timeline, was albeit friendly with him on a collaborative basis - so he had to accept that the offer was genuine. He also, perhaps hardest of all, had to accept that he was going to need help.

Pepper peeled away from him, going to stand with Rhodes, Ross, and the “Hogan” fellow she’d mentioned earlier. His was the only other pale face in the room. He didn’t bother to wish she would have stayed close.

He turned to Steve, then. This time, meeting his scrutiny head on. “You’re not going to give this up, are you?”

“One more white guy isn’t going to save the world.” Okoye chuckled.

Stephen winced in sympathy, but didn’t contradict him.

“So what, _two_ white guys are supposed to make it all right again?” Stephen joked back, without feeling.

“No, but a Sorcerer Supreme and a super soldier might have a shot,” Steve responded, unflapped.

“So.” Steve’s sudden resolution was jarring, but Stephen could tell that the man was burying his qualms under the opportunity for a better universe. It was all he could possibly hope for, could grasp onto and make real. He was the only one among them who could make a better reality of all the wishful what-ifs they all undoubtedly dreamed of. “No point in me staying, then. And you said we can’t go back and change this universe’s timeline without fracturing it. So what’s the game plan?”

“Surgery.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, of a sort.” The room had gone quiet again, their patience finally being met with the resolution they’d helped engineer. “When you have multiple traumas like the Omniverse is suffering right now, you take it one trauma at a time. Sometimes it’s halting the bleeding, sometimes it’s amputating a lost cause.” The quiet froze. “With this timeline, it’s a lost cause. It has to remain a closed loop.”

Ramonda's face was turned to him, but her focus was immutable. Still, she was not having him hog-tied and put into cold storage, so he had to take that as her acceptance of his assessment. “When I… we leave, I am going to close it off from the other dimensions, try and restore balance to other timelines by making this the one timeline where Thanos succeeds. Fate is bleeding through the cracks in reality, and it’s drawing disaster across dimensional boundaries. If I can staunch the flow, one universe at a time if need be, the timelines should be left to their own mistakes.”

“Why does there even have to be one where he succeeds?” Steve mused, and Stephen understood that as a question to the heavens, not a question to him. He was grateful.

“To get you and I up off our asses and doing something about it, I suppose,” he answered all the same, and Steve’s fierce approval struck him for the first time. “If the fucker didn’t get away with it and cause all this mess, I’d still be in bed back in Greenwich Village.”

“To think you were there the whole time and we never knew it,” Pepper interjected then, re-entering the circle of conversation with Rhodes in tow. 

“Pretty rookie mistake if you ask me,” the colonel added.

“To be fair to you, we purposefully avoided your attention. And we’ve been flying under the radar for much longer than you.” It was a bit of a sting, given how severely this world had been forced to plumb the depths of secrecy, but true all the same. Kamar Taj had survived the Crusades… he wondered, before quickly internalizing the thought, how well they’d managed here.

He didn’t have time to find out, and didn’t have the heart to ask.

“So what happens, when you… excise me from this dimension?” Steve asked, standing up from the work surface he’d been taking a rest against. He seemed to have needed to think it through to recognize that risk, regardless of Stephen having lost the argument against it.

Stephen had the idle temptation to scare him, to make one last stab at driving him away from the fate he too had blindly devoted himself to. On nothing more than good faith, and some fraction of ability. Which was, really, exactly what Rogers was bringing to the table too.

Because he knew there was no way in heaven or hell that he was going to be able to survive time jump after time jump, aimlessly wandering toward attempts at resolution, but really only managing to kill himself - and the future of his dimension - in the process. Between the two of them, working toward the same end but in disparate ways, they might pull it off.

_Might_.

“Even if you help me, you won’t disappear. _This_ time won’t disappear, and if we leave, you become like me. You exist anywhere - your ties to the timeline that created you severed.” Steve did wince at that, but that was the only concession he gave to the past he was leaving behind. “Even if we succeed and the Omniverse heals, it won’t keep events in your time from having happened. Your world and mine are already different - independent in events as well as fate.” 

Stephen sucked in a deep breath, the tang of a Catch 22 on his lips, “And if you choose to be done, if you want to come back, you can re-enter it at any time.” He might be stealing one of this world’s last resources, but he wasn’t above returning it, should it come to that. He had to steel himself for that possibility - that his choice was too much for others to bear was why he’d left alone in the first place.

He would rather place bets on ending up alone, than risk wasted faith on someone staying with him.

“Are you satisfied with that?”

The Wakandans had already made their goodbyes. They stood up to his scrutiny of not needing Rogers to fight their battles for them. What few decent Americans remained seemed resigned at worst - one more of their familiar faces lost, but for good reasons.

Steve, for his part, stepped forward and offered his hand.

“I’m with you, ‘til the end of the line.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for anyone still following this story for the length of time between updates, but honestly the holidays got away from me, and my current teaching load has been more than enough to make my time for recreational writing scant. I have not given up on this story nor will I, but I may have to adjust update expectations to once a month rather than every two weeks. Primarily because the chapters are going to look a lot more like this one, and that just takes time.
> 
> PS: Yes, there is a whiff of a could-have-been ship that I adore - which is drpepperony - but which will only be ever hinted at again hereafter. If I start doing one-shot drabbles by request, it is a ship I will gladly take prompts for. For now, onwards! (FINALLY.)


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